becomes unendurable, and a prince again attains power. No state, however,
is so powerful as to escape succumbing to a rival before it completes the
circuit. Protection against the corruption of the state is possible only
through the maintenance of its principles, and its restoration only by a
return to the healthy source whence it originated. This is secured either
by some external peril compelling to reflection, or internally, by wise
thought, by good laws (framed in accordance with the general welfare, and
not according to the ambition of a minority), and by the example of good
men.

[Footnote 1: In his _Essays on the First Decade of Livy (Discorsi)_,
Machiavelli investigates the conditions and the laws of the maintenance of
states; while in _The Prince (II Principe_, 1515), he gives the principles
for the restoration of a ruined state. Besides these he wrote a history
of Florence, and a work on the art of war, in which he recommended the
establishment of national armies.]

In the interval between Machiavelli and the system of natural law of
Grotius, the Netherlander (1625: _De Jure Belli et Pacis_), belong the
socialistic ideal state of the Englishman, Thomas More (_De Optimo
Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia_, 1516), the political theory of
the Frenchman, Jean Bodin (_Six Livres de la République_, 1577, Latin 1584;
also a philosophico-historical treatise, _Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum
Cognitionem_, and the _Colloquium Heptaplomeres_, edited by Noack, 1857),
and the law of war of the Italian, Albericus Gentilis, at his death
professor in Oxford (_De Jure Belli_, 1588). Common to these three was
the advocacy of religious tolerance, from which atheists alone were to
be excepted; common, also, their ethical standpoint in opposition to
Machiavelli, while they are at one with him in regard to the liberation of
political and legal science from theology and the Church. With Gentilis